Pioneer in the Hardware of Culture: Roger Burlingame’s March of the Iron Men and Engines of Democracy

Abstract

Pioneer in the Hardware of CultureRoger Burlingame’s March of the Iron Men and Engines of Democracy Howard P. Segal (bio) In teaching the history of technology I have often distributed to my students the appendixes from Roger Burlingame’s March of the Iron Men: A Social History of Union through Invention and its sequel, Engines of Democracy: Inventions and Society in Mature America, books published in 1938 and 1940, respectively. There are two columns, the one on the left headed “Events” and the one on the right headed “Inventions.” March’s initial Event is the “1630 Settlement of Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and the first Invention is the “1634 Sawmill (first American), Maine.” March’s final Events are “1865 Lincoln’s 2d term, Lincoln assassinated, and Lee surrenders,” while the last Invention is the “1865 Web printing press, William Bullock, Pennsylvania.” For Engines, the first and last Events are the “1866 Civil Rights Act” and the “1929 Stock Market collapse”; the first and last Inventions are the “1866 Atlantic cable, Cyrus W. Field, New York; Compressed air rock drill, Charles Burleigh, Massachusetts; and Iron tank cars, Pennsylvania,” and the “1929 Polaroid, Edwin H. Land, Massachusetts.”1 In his preface to March, Burlingame claims to have included “as complete a list of American inventions [and inventors] as has been possible.” Any errors of omission [End Page 426] and commission derive from his admittedly not being among either “professional historians” or “professional technicians.” Engines omits such remarks but offers comparable materials, with the disclaimer of Burlingame having “had to meet the increased difficulties of the technics themselves with an untechnical mind.” Each book, moreover, offers not just an extensive and sometimes annotated bibliography (eighteen and twenty-three pages, respectively) but also a separate “classified index” listing specific fields of invention and individual inventors. I always praise the pioneering approach of these books in connecting political, economic, diplomatic, and military developments with technological developments of the same years. In their day, they had few if any rivals for use in high schools and colleges or with the general public. Despite Burlingame’s disavowal of being a professional historian, Robert C. Post recently reminded us that Mel Kranzberg suggested that he become SHOT’s first president, presumably an affirmation of his respect for Burlingame’s writings on the history of technology.2 Indeed, Mel induced Burlingame to contribute what became the lead article to the very first issue of Technology and Culture, “The Hardware of Culture.” In semiautobiographical style Burlingame recounted themes elaborated on in his histories, noting both the limited number of secondary works available in the 1930s and the special utility of Abbott Payson Usher’s History of Mechanical Inventions (1929) and Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934), “which did what I hoped to do, but on a world scale.” Burlingame concluded that the field was still “relatively empty,” but that it offered “wide opportunity.” “The tools for this all-embracing historiography are rapidly multiplying.”3 Altogether, Burlingame published quite a lot on technology, and not just on American technology. Besides March and Engines, he also wrote the broadly conceived Backgrounds of Power: The Human Story of Mass Production (1949), covering technological developments as far back as ancient Egypt—which he listed in “The Hardware of Culture” as the last of a trilogy along with March and Engines—and Machines That Built America (1953), which summarizes much of those first two volumes. There were also Inventors Behind Inventors (1947) and the complementary Scientists [End Page 427] Behind the Inventors (1960); Dictator Clock: 5000 Years of Telling Time (1966); four biographical studies—Whittling Boy: The Story of Eli Whitney (1941), General Billy Mitchell: Champion of Air Defense (1952), Henry Ford: A Great Life in Brief (1955), and Out of Silence: The Life of Alexander Graham Bell (1964); and Mosquitoes in the Big Ditch (1952), a history of the Panama Canal for juveniles. And there were histories of both the Scribner (1946) and McGraw-Hill (1959) publishing firms which discussed technological as well as editorial, managerial, and financial developments.4 Born in New York City in 1889 to the son of the longtime editor of Scribner’s Magazine—part of the prestigious...